


stop, drop and roll

by c_onstellations



Category: NCT (Band), WayV (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Firefighters, M/M, Strangers to Lovers, bongshik the cat makes a guest appearance, mama huang mvp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:22:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23231644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/c_onstellations/pseuds/c_onstellations
Summary: “Wow, I didn’t think that I would see you again this quickly.”Renjun exhales, yet again, “neither did I. My aim in life isn’t really to have regular run-ins with the city’s fire department.”
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Wong Yuk Hei | Lucas
Comments: 14
Kudos: 175





	stop, drop and roll

The first time Renjun meets Xuxi is pure coincidence. ~~~~

Renjun gets up in the middle of his Russian Literature lecture, ignoring the way his professor eyes him warily, and hotfoots it home the minute his mother shoots him a cryptic text. ( _“come home now!”_ It’s like he’s fifteen again, the notification triggering some sort of panic response in him. He’s momentarily taken back to when he was a teenager, doing teenager-y things, when the possibility of getting grounded was still on the table.)

Home is a twenty minute walk away, fifteen minutes if he runs fast enough.

His stomach drops at the sight of the fire engine parked outside the complex and prays that everything is under control.

The door to Renjun’s apartment is wide-open when he arrives, and he bursts through the entrance, chest heaving from the very vigorous run-slash-walk that he unintentionally put himself through. To his confusion, he catches his mother mid-laugh, looking up at a fireman fiddling with the fire alarm on the ceiling. To be frank, she looks far too happy to be caught in a situation that warranted the fire department _literally_ showing up at his door. 

"Ma, what happened? Why are you here?"

"Junjun, you're here! I missed you, so I hopped on to the next flight that was available and came here to see you!” She drags her son into a hug, and Renjun reciprocates, still dazed, many questions left unanswered. It’s not everyday that your mother randomly turns up out of the blue and somehow summons the fire department while doing so.

Renjun looks up and points. “And who is that?”

“This is Xuxi from the fire department, he was telling me how to disable the smoke alarm when it goes off."

The human personification of a golden retriever looks down at him, eyes lively and visage smiling. When he gets down from the ladder, Renjun despairs, very mildly and very quickly, at how his neck is still craned to look up at him. And also how the reflective strips that adorn his uniform are painfully neon in the shitty fluorescent light of his apartment.

"Hi, you're Renjun?" Xuxi speaks in Mandarin, and someone who speaks Mandarin in this city is hard to come by. "I think your mother got a little confused by this thingamajig, but it's all good, I explained it to her!"

Renjun heaves a sigh of relief, his paranoia slowly undoing itself as he feels the knots in his chest unravel. “Oh, that’s good. Nothing happened?”

“Nope, nothing much, no worries!” Xuxi beams.

“Xuxi explained everything to me so well, I’m sure that nothing will go wrong again.”

Renjun peers at the rest of the fire department chilling around his dining area. It is a surreal picture that he is faced with, and he does not know how to deal with it. “Well, usually nothing goes wrong. Sometimes the smoke alarm goes off for no reason other than the fact that it likes to be a liability.”

Now that he knows that everything is fine, he is kind of in a hurry to get the firefighters out of his unit. He doesn't know if his landlord is seeing this, but if he does, Renjun’s never going to hear the end of it. He's _not_ about to embark on the tumultuous journey that is finding a new place to move into mid-semester. Determinedly, he sends the whole posse out, Xuxi included.

Xuxi gives him a wholehearted wave as he makes his way outside.

"Nice boy." Mama Huang comments, as she watches the fire engine pull away from the driveway. "I like him."

"Mm."

The second time they meet is brought about by Jeno’s cat.

“So you’re saying,” Renjun is speaking as slowly and calmly as he can, because he’s almost sure that he will lose it if he doesn’t try to actively suppress his temper, “that you saw Bongshik climb up the tree,” _deep breath_ , “and when you couldn’t get her down, you decided to take matters into your own hands?”

“Yes,” nods Jeno, from his perch in the tree.

“And you think this is perfectly reasonable behaviour?” Renjun glares up at him, exasperated.

“What was I going to do? Leave her here alone?” Jeno shrugs. Bongshik meows indignantly in Jeno’s arms, and his attention is redirected back to her. “Shh, baby, it’s okay now.”

Lee Jeno, honour roll student, varsity basketball player with nerves of steel. Could do absolutely anything he sets his mind to, because that’s the kind of person he is.

Until it comes to his cat. When it comes to the damn cat, all rationality goes straight out the window. Renjun can’t believe that he had to leave his film class midway to fetch his friend out of a tree. Out of a tree! Except —

“Lee Jeno,” Renjun speaks seriously, “what were you expecting me to do when you called me here.”

“I’m not sure, really. When I realised the situation I got into, my first thought was to call my most responsible friend.” Jeno’s eyes curve into half-moons. “That’s you, Renjunnie!”

Somehow, the compliment seems more like a curse than anything else. Renjun huffs loudly, turns his back on the mess in the tree, and pulls his phone out of his sweater pocket.

“Hello, is this the fire department? Yes, I’m calling in today because my friend is stuck in a tree.”

“Your friend? Like a cat?” The dispatcher laughs. Renjun doesn’t blame them; he would laugh too, if faced with a situation as incredulous as this.

“I wish, but no. My friend is a fully grown man. My friend, and his demon cat.” Somewhere behind him, Bongshik hisses. “They are both in a tree, and now they cannot get down.”

When the fire department arrives, only two men hop out from the rig. Apparently, this wasn’t deemed a big enough emergency compared to the last time an entire squad of neon men was dispatched to sit in Renjun’s apartment and watch their colleague deliver a Mandarin tutorial on how to disable a fire alarm.

Jeno points to one of them from his ridiculous vantage point in the sky. “Mark hyung!”

Mark hyung squints up at Jeno, and recognition flashes through his eyes. “Wow, I was telling my coworker that this would be some shit that my neighbour would pull! Nobody else would do this for a cat except you.”

“You know each other?” Renjun gawks. What are the odds?

“Yeah,” Mark replies, heading back to the truck, presumably to ready the equipment specifically made to hoist men and their cats out of trees. “He’s my neighbour.”

“Lee Jeno, you’re telling me that you have an actual firefighter for a neighbour, and _still_ you decided to call me first?”

“People make illogical decisions when they panic, it’s alright,” a voice laughs. Renjun turns towards its source and is faced with a familiar figure.

Xuxi.

In the grander scheme of things, Mark is more than capable of rescuing fully grown men (and their cats from trees), so Xuxi and Renjun stand along the sidelines and watch it all unfold in front of them.

“Wow, I didn’t think that I would see you again _this quickly_.”

Renjun exhales, yet again, “neither did I. My aim in life isn’t really to have regular run-ins with the city’s fire department.”

“That’s fair,” Xuxi laughs. Some foreign feeling begins to take root in Renjun’s chest, and it grows with the sound of Xuxi’s laughter. Renjun squashes it down, files it under things to handle another time, when he’s less overwhelmed by the situation abound.

Renjun pointedly tries to redirect the flow of the conversation. “Oh, and my mother’s really thankful for your help the last time round.” _Real smooth, Renjun._ “She wants to treat you to dinner some time but between you and me, I’m pretty sure she’s just overjoyed about how there’s finally another person she can speak Mandarin to other than me.”

“It’s actually no big deal, all in a day’s work.” Xuxi pauses, looking at Renjun’s face. An unreadable expression passes through his countenance, then softens. “But if it will make her happy, I wouldn’t be opposed to a home cooked meal or two.”

This leads up to the third time they meet.

Xuxi is in his apartment again but fortunately, this time, he is much less neon and more easy on the eyes.

Not that Xuxi was never easy on the eyes. That would just be lying. (But you didn’t hear that from Renjun.) By all means, Xuxi is attractive, long-legged, perfect features, sun-kissed skin with a good personality to boot.

No wonder Renjun’s mother loves him. (No other reason. Just his mother. Why do you ask?)

Xuxi pokes his head into the kitchen. “Auntie, do you need me to help out with anything?”

Renjun’s mother shoots Xuxi a glance from where she’s dicing mushrooms, putting the tofu in the steamer, and marinating the chicken, somehow all at the same time. “No, it’s fine. Junjun, show Xuxi around!”

Renjun isn’t sure why his mother thinks that there’s anything to look at in his apartment, because she had been living here for the last three days herself and even she commented that his unit was truly a landmark of desolation.

He’s not showing Xuxi that. Let him save what little dignity that he had left.

In a bid to save whatever’s still salvageable of Xuxi’s impression of him, he takes him on a walk outside to the nearest convenience store.

Theoretically, it ought to be short and uneventful. Yet, the entire walk is a highlight; Xuxi is a gifted conversationalist, he’s got anecdotes that spill out of him endlessly — when Mark dropped a watermelon and it rolled down a hill, that one close call where he thought he lost a little girl in a burning building but managed to pull her out in the nick of time, when he decided to drop out of medical school because he realised that he wasn’t interested in becoming a doctor, he had aspirations of reaching out to others but not like this.

When they reach the store, Xuxi asks if there’s anything that Mama Huang would like, and it dawns on him, clear as day, that Renjun realises what a sweetheart Xuxi is.

On the walk home, a total of three cats stop to be petted by Xuxi’s gargantuan hands, and Renjun thinks of the little girl, conveniently ignores the life-threatening scenario surrounding her story and briefly muses what it must feel like to be held by them.

When they return home, the sun is just setting and Xuxi’s position at the table leaves watercolour streaks running across the side of his face, extending down to the tablecloth. In the time that Renjun’s been living here, he has never had more than one other person around, and how funny it is that Xuxi is the one to fill that position.

Xuxi, the firefighter, on the ladder in his kitchen. Xuxi, just Xuxi, sitting in the dining room. It’s different now, almost comical seeing Xuxi sitting at his table, completely dwarfing the stool that he’s balanced upon.

His mother nearly splits her sides from laughing over dinner. Renjun nearly splits his pants from overeating.

All in all, it is a happy occasion.

It’s a busy time for Renjun, swamped with work and school, barely having enough time to show his face in his own house. He knows that his mother is probably bored out of her mind. If Xuxi can give her what he can’t, then he’s more than glad to let him into his life.

No other reason.

The fourth time occurs in the kindergarten Renjun works at.

Renjun is employed there part-time, passing up classroom assistant opportunities for administrative work instead because he is a _little_ afraid of what the children can do sometimes.

“Renjun?”

Renjun drops his work. In front of him, standing in the middle of the office is Xuxi, in his full highlighter glory, balancing his helmet under his arm.

“Oh, hey, what are you doing here?” _Casual. Good going, Renjun._

“The fire department is doing an education program today with the kids. I didn’t know that you worked here.”

“Oh, it’s nothing.” Renjun pulls a binder out from its place on the organiser. “I help out from time to time.” He thumbs through it quickly and draws out today’s program.

Renjun places the paper on the desk where Xuxi can see. “You’ll be working with the five year olds and the six year olds. I’m assuming that your other colleagues are here too. Which group will you be taking?”

“Yeah, Mark’s outside.” Xuxi sets the helmet down on the chair beside him, and with his newly-freed arm, he extends it to rub against his nape. “Ah, is there a group where you’ll be around? This is my first time working the program, so it would be good to get all the help I can.”

“Help? How would I be helpful?” Renjun laughs, half flattered, half perplexed.

“You’re a familiar face, I guess.” Xuxi responds, suddenly resolute. “And your cat friend also said you’re responsible, so I know I’ll be in good hands...but if things don’t line up, it’s alright.”

Xuxi’s nervousness about presenting to a group of little kids is somehow endearing. He takes his job seriously, and that’s a breath of fresh air. Renjun respects that. “No, don’t worry about it. I’ll swap my work allocation with Jaemin today. I’m sure that he’ll be okay with it.” Renjun reaches out to pat Xuxi on the arm. “I’ll help you out.”

It turns out that Jaemin’s more than pleased to swap. (Apparently he got peer pressured into going bouldering over the weekend and now he’s aching all over and very much not in the mood to be reminded of all the muscles in his body by spending the next few hours crawling around with little kids.)

It also turns out that Xuxi had absolutely nothing to be worried about. He’s bubbly in a way that helps him hit it off with the kids immediately, and they’re absolutely taken by the luminosity of a man who tells them how to not set things on fire. Renjun doesn’t even have to do much: he helps to flip the gigantic picture book of fire safety protocols broken down to kid-level understanding and occasionally _tsks_ at the kids to _pay full attention to firefighter-hyung_! _He’s trying to tell you something important!_

The kids are all stop-drop-and-rolling. Xuxi tears his gaze away from the excited children to beam at Renjun, quietly observing from the back of the room. Renjun smiles back, giddy with joy. In a classroom decked in glow-in-the-dark stars and cardboard finger-painted planets, maybe Xuxi is the sun.

The fifth time comes to him as a surprise.

Before Renjun even makes it to his unit, he can hear his mother speaking loudly in Mandarin.

There’s only one person that she could possibly be talking to.

In retrospect, Renjun ought to have seen this coming. It’s his mother’s last day here; tomorrow morning he would have to send her off to the airport at the crack of dawn so that she doesn’t miss her flight. Of course she would want to see his face again, right before she leaves.

His key turns in the lock, and he is greeted by the sight of Xuxi setting the table for dinner. Renjun doesn’t think he will ever get over how boyish he looks like this, out of his firefighting uniform and in plainclothes, positioning a crockpot of lotus root soup in the middle of the dining table. He’s still as bright as the sun.

Mama Huang had bought a new chair, _because you might want to have people around one day_. (Both of them knew that “people” really just referred to one person. That person is Xuxi, and that’s okay. It feels right.) Xuxi’s delighted by the new chair, and none of them mention how this is going to be the last time they’ll have dinner as three for a while.

This is going to be the last time they’ll have dinner as three for a while.

When will he see Xuxi again?

The notion lingers, heavy and brooding, on Renjun’s chest. He feels the dread slowly building up as the bottoms of the dishes become more visible with every passing moment.

They clean up after the meal, slowly, but time drags them along cruelly nonetheless. It’s almost as if he can hear the clock ticking as he circles suds all over his plates, _tick, tock, tick tock_. Xuxi takes so long to wipe the cutlery dry that the water’s already evaporated and gone on its own. Renjun’s gaze drops to the new chair sitting in the middle of his apartment, and his mind goes into overdrive thinking about how Xuxi has already managed to carve out a place of his own in Renjun’s life.

Renjun walks Xuxi downstairs, _just because_. Sends him all the way to the bus stop, _just because_. Xuxi is on night duty tonight, so he’s headed back to the station, his duffle bag of necessities slung over his left shoulder and Renjun next to him on the right. He waits with him at the bus stop, _just because_.

Xuxi’s bus approaches slowly in the distance, and he gets up in preparation to board it. Renjun thinks of the new chair in his apartment, and something in him breaks.

“Wait, I have something to get off my chest.”

Xuxi sits back down again — a decision that he makes too swiftly, Renjun notes in hindsight — all ears for what Renjun has to say.

“When is the next time I’ll see you again?” Renjun breathes. His voice is quiet because he’s afraid that if he speaks too loud, the moment will pass, just like it had earlier in his kitchen.

“I’m sure your friends will promptly run into some kind of trouble soon,” Xuxi half-laughs, but it comes up a little empty and all around unconvincing. The air around them is too thick, laden with too many things left unsaid.

Renjun stops swinging his legs from where he’s seated on the bench. “You know what I mean.”

“Of course I do.”

Xuxi pauses.

Watches Renjun’s face tentatively, twiddling his thumbs nervously before he speaks again.

“I end my shift tomorrow evening. Would you be interested in grabbing dinner with me then? There’s a nice little Italian diner that opened downtown.”

Renjun nods, the same warmth blooming somewhere deep in his chest, and he swears he sees relief flood Xuxi’s expression.

“It’s a date.”

(The sixth time they meet, it begins with Renjun picking Xuxi up from the fire station, intertwining their hands together on the walk to the diner. In this light, everything is new, everything is familiar.

And the sun, the sun kisses him goodnight, kisses him all the times after that too.)

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to [xin](https://twitter.com/prive_bbh) for being my beta and reading all my self-indulgent ideas <3
> 
> [twt](https://twitter.com/_hwangtwt) | [cc](https://curiouscat.me/_hwangtwt)


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